


Memetic

by BaggedGenreNovel (dzen)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: After Us, Ancestors, Anger, Angst, Character Study, Decisions, Defining Moments, Epiphanies, Gen, Religion, Revolution, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-16 06:58:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3478730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dzen/pseuds/BaggedGenreNovel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It wasn’t a very impressive pillar. Not that much taller than an average troll. </i>Tall enough,<i> Rufioh thought. </i></p>
<p>A young cavalreaper sneaks away from camp to make a pilgrimage of sorts. </p>
<p>Inspired by After Us by EmptyFeet (youtube).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memetic

It wasn’t a very impressive pillar. Not that much taller than an average troll. _Tall enough,_ Rufioh thought. There were no rusty manacles, of course. No bones, no arrow. Just an old, crumbling, pillar, with a loop at the top where a chain might attach. The dusk wind, hot and dusty, seemed irreverently loud.

 

The young Cavalreaper knew he should be moving on. Pilgrims, it was whispered, were dealt with ruthlessly and _slowly_ by the skeleton guard which stalked the surrounding tundra. Not that pilgrims officially existed of course. Not that this pillar was anywhere special.

 

_It was real,_ Rufioh told himself.

 

The Pink moon had almost risen, and the last of the suns’ light was fading away. His troop would be stirring, soon. The walk back would take at least an hour, if he planned to conceal his path. Which he must.

 

Rufioh twitched his shoulders and scratched at the back of his jacket, but made no move to leave. The slight shift of cloth against delicate membrane was only a temporary relief, hardly worth the effort. But tonight his awareness of what was bound, the tightness at his back, was heightened to the point where he could barely stand it.

 

It was an aching in his chest as well, he realised. As though the purely physical irritation had spread and ( _ha!_ ) mutated. Roots of fire spiking through him, growing from his back and… from his eyes. From the sight before him.

 

It had been so forgotten, so erased. The Inquisitors had done their work well. In spite of himself, Rufioh’s eyes kept scanning the ground, searching for a speck of blood, some artifact to prove the truth. To erase the bitter certainty at the back of his throat that it was all an elabourate ploy to lure malcontents. A lie from the very start. He surged forward, _needing_ to look closer.

 

He halted after barely a step. Frowned.

 

He’d first heard about the Sufferer from a dying mentor. It was ironic, really: one dead teacher passing him into the care of another. Hurrimang, his first and last captain in the Cavalreapers, had coughed up khaki down Rufioh’s chest as Rufioh half dragged her away from the rainbow splattered seashore and back towards camp. They’d been struggling to beat the dawn, both of them gasping for breath but only one of them really catching any.

 

“Kid. Kid, stop.”

 

Rufioh had set his teeth, and kept hauling. “Not much farther.”

 

“No. Stop.”

 

“And maybe I can summon something to carry us when we get closer to the trees.”

 

“You don’t understand.” Hurrimang had dug her heels in then, and reached up to brace herself on one of Rufioh’s enormous horns, making him gasp instinctively. His head twisted around to stare at her.

 

“Rufioh,” She said, looking firmly into his eyes, “Don’t make me be culled.”

 

Rufioh had not wanted to listen.

 

“Don’t you dare tell me you don’t understand me _now_ , lieutenant.”

 

He tore his gaze away. Shifted his grip around her waist. She was too weak to stop him when he glared at the horizon, and, without a word, dragged them both forwards once more.

 

She’d had no necklace to pass on to him. The Cavalreaper training was rigorous and communal. You ate together, trained together, performed ablutions together, and, if you were anything below a lieutenant, slept in a communal recuperacoon while at base. A visible symbol would have been pure self-indulgent folly. Her religion notwithstanding, Hurrimang herself had never suffered fools.

 

Instead, as he defied her will, she told him stories. About the old greenblood who’d saved her from an early culling. About the mutant who’d never learned the lesson that Hurrimang had that day, had never learned how to shut up.

 

Rufioh had stomped on. The smell of gore was becoming nauseating, but he hadn’t dared stop.

 

Hurrimang’s first kismesis, she told him, was a rustblood with an _awful_ sentimental streak. Rufioh had never asked. He’d known there was a story, everyone had a story. But you never _asked_. Now Hurrimang told him, _described_ for him, how pointlessly, how _casually,_ Luon had been murdered (”yes _murdered_ , kid. That’s the real way to say it.”). Just because he’d smiled at the wrong blueblood, in the wrong bar.

 

“..and it wasn’t even the idiot nookwipe’s fault that time.”

 

As Hurrimang had neared the end of her story, Rufioh had expected her to ask him to stop again. He’d expected heavy silence, designed to make him stew. A renewed order. Maybe a softened plea. He’d _braced_ against it. Prepared to defend.

 

Instead, she ambushed him with words. The full weight of personal tragedy was thrown behind a crescendo of stories within stories, within stories. Love unbounded by quadrants. Friendships that disregarded castes, and were all the stronger for it. The power of a revolution. An alternate Alternia, where culling was different, and _blood_ was different, and _people were different_. And always, she brought it back around. To the troll who’d talked, and screamed, and died, so that they would share his dreams.

 

Finally, as they neared the edge of the dunes and the cover of the trees, Hurrimang had hooked a foot around his ankle, tripping him. It was a wriggler move, and a wriggler should have been able to block it. But he was tired and heartsick, and she, well…

 

She barked a laugh, short and harsh. He started to talk, started to rise, but she slapped him, right across the mouth. It barely made a sound. He stopped, shocked.

 

“Shut up.” She rasped. “I don’t have all night.” She caught, and held his eyes, then directed them down, to the sand between them. She raised a claw, and drew. And smiled at him. And sighed.

 

“It’s the stories, Rufioh.” She stared down at the mark she’d made. “They were all he ever had. All he ever thought we needed.”

 

Rufioh’s eyes stung.

 

Suddenly she laughed, and looked up into his swimming eyes as though they were sharing a joke. “He’d have made a shitty fucking captain, though.”

 

Rufioh’s mentor grinned, and punched his shoulder far too softly. She collapsed fully onto the rough ground, a rasping chuckle rising from her, growing louder. She closed her eyes. Rufioh stared, then dropped his own head onto his arms.

 

At the edge of the trees in the predawn light, two prone figures laughed like sandpaper.

 

When Rufioh had returned alone to camp early the following night, wearing a grubby captain’s sash, the general had been furious.

 

“Where the MOTHERFUCK WERE YOU AT?” she raged.

 

She’d wanted to know why he’d wasted a night trying to salvage dead weight.

 

———————

 

Sweeps in the future, but not many, Rufioh stared at a pillar, and stepped no closer. It wasn’t a very impressive pillar, in its own right. It was dusty, and ruined, and utterly unremarkable. It might not even be the right pillar.

 

It was possible that the pillar was simply a pillar, nothing more than significant than stone. Rufioh found, now, that he did not care.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Constructive criticism will earn my adoration. All other reviews will be met with my heartfelt thanks. Please, guys: Help me fix my writing, if you can. :)
> 
> After watching After Us, I really wanted to read or write something about how the Summoner felt about the Sufferer. Thanks go to EmptyFeet (HeatedHeadwear on AO3, I think), for inspiration and ancestor feels.


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